University Presses; The Pirate King

By N. A. M. Rodger

Published: October 25, 1998

Heroes attract biographers, but it is a long time since they attracted scholars. No modern university historian could possibly write the life of a famous hero and hope to preserve his reputation, unless he destroyed that of his subject. This has been true for so long that the supply of intact, undemolished heroes is virtually exhausted. Sir Francis Drake (1540-96) is certainly not one of the survivors, which presents Harry Kelsey with a problem. He avoids it by attacking what he insists is still a living tradition: Drake as the pious Protestant whose exploits saved his country from the horrors of Roman Catholicism and founded the British naval tradition.

Kelsey's central point, endlessly repeated, is that Drake was a pirate. This refers to a very old controversy. Victorian popular writers like Charles Kingsley and Sir Henry Newbolt, the creators of the image that Kelsey wants to destroy, were embarrassed at the suggestion that their ideal of manly Protestant patriotism might have been a common criminal. They therefore took pains to stress that though Drake began his career raiding the coasts and shipping of Spain, with which England was then at peace, he had legal, or at least moral, justification for his actions, and no sordid motive like making money. There may possibly be a few elderly readers left, who read Kingsley and Newbolt when they were young and have read nothing since, for whom Kelsey's discovery will come as a salutary shock. Everyone else will be somewhat puzzled at the revival of this long-dead issue, for no popular biographer of Drake for generations has denied what he was doing in the 1560's and 70's, and no scholarly historian has ever done so.

If it was worth reviving the piracy issue, it was in order to draw out the ways in which the legal and moral situation in the 16th century differed from that of our day. It would be helpful to explain what reprisals were under marcher law, what the meaning of the Spanish word corsario was (not at all the same as the English ''pirate'') and what the legal implications of the ''lines of amity'' that supposedly divided the Spanish and Portuguese empires from the rest of the world were -- technical stuff, perhaps, but important to specialists, and necessary in order to understand Drake's world. Unfortunately, Kelsey, who teaches history at the University of California, Riverside, makes no attempt to paint in this background, and his one reference to reprisals makes it clear that he does not understand them at all.

This is the great defect of what is in many respects the most scholarly life of Drake yet. The focus is exceedingly close: anything that cannot be seen through a microscope is not seen at all. There is nothing to explain the political and social situation of 16th-century England, nothing on the international and diplomatic context that generated the English-Spanish war, nothing on the development of shipbuilding, navigation, naval tactics and strategy. The result is that Drake is implicitly judged not against his standards but ours. Here is a candidate whom no respectable faculty club would dream of admitting, a white male suspected of misbehavior toward women and minority races. Moreover, Kelsey argues, Drake's contemporaries felt somewhat the same way about him. He had no great reputation in England in his lifetime; the Drake myth was all the work of later generations. Queen Elizabeth, the author repeats, refused to trust him with an important command. Thus Kelsey writes out of his history the 1585 and 1595 Caribbean expeditions and the 1587 Cadiz raid, all three of which Drake commanded with the Queen's commission, and the 1588 Armada campaign, in which he was second in command. To be fair, these events are not literally written out of the book, but they are treated hastily and carelessly, and it is clear that the author is not interested in Drake's later career, a period of open war in which he acted under the Queen's orders and cannot easily be accused of piracy (though he is here).

The real focus of Kelsey's minute attention is Drake's early life: his obscure origins, his time as a young follower of Sir John Hawkins and his famous voyage round the world, which takes up nearly a third of the book. On Drake's birth and upbringing Kelsey has lavished wide reading (including the work of modern scholars) and careful research in a variety of English archives, both of which are markedly lacking later in the book. On the round-the-world voyage Kelsey's meticulous approach and his work in Spanish archives are at their best, and he has new things to say, especially about the cartographic evidence, that will be of great interest to specialists.

AT the least, ''Sir Francis Drake'' is going to be important to scholars for its detailed findings on Drake's early career. What it does not do is give us the whole picture. To condemn a man of the 16th century for failing to conform to the standards of the 20th is as illiberal and unhelpful as to condemn a man of the 20th for having the wrong color skin. Of course Drake was keenly interested in making money from war at sea, and none too scrupulous in how he did so. So were all his English contemporaries, from the Queen downward. Naval officers well into the 19th century were in it for the money, among other things, but we do not find it necessary to accuse Admiral Nelson of being incompetent or weak or unpatriotic merely because he had prize money on his mind.

It is useless to write Drake off as a leader with a paranoid suspicion of disloyalty without describing the situation of a commander of humble origins in an age when all authority was based on birth, and he had gentlemen serving under him who had every reason to expect to be in charge. It is easy enough to find 16th-century witnesses who attacked Drake, for he had many personal enemies and professional rivals. What the modern reader needs to know is why he was attacked, and to what extent we should believe his enemies. To answer that, an author has to take his eye away from the microscope and look around.